KJP Reveals How She Learned Biden Was Dropping Out Of The Race

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre revealed in her new book that she found out former President Joe Biden was dropping out of the presidential election on a staff zoom call.

Jean-Pierre is expected to publish her book “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines” on Oct. 21, which details why she chose to leave the Democratic party. The top Biden spokesperson published an excerpt of her book in Newsweek, which explains that she was invited to an unexpected senior staff call last summer, where she learned Biden would be publicly dropping out of the race in a few minutes. (RELATED: After Four Years Of Failure, White House Press Corps Does Complete 180 Under Trump)

“I checked in with Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, and some members of my team. Then, at about 1 p.m., I happened to glance at my work phone. There was an invite to an unexpected meeting happening in 45 minutes,” Jean-Pierre writes of the morning Biden dropped out of the race.

“The invitation had been sent to the senior advisers, myself, LaBolt, Tom Perez, and Stephen Benjamin, all of whom were usually part of our daily chief of staff meeting at 8:15 a.m. The impromptu gathering left me with mixed feelings. It had to be one of two things—one of the scenarios unimaginable,” she continued.

Jean-Pierre writes that when she hopped on the call, there was all the normal senior leadership but, unexpectedly, campaign leadership and also Biden.

“My mind went into overdrive. My heart began to pound,” she writes. “The meeting started right on time. And boom, the moment Biden popped on, he delivered the news.”

“‘Hey everyone, it’s Joe,’ he said. I don’t remember his exact words, but he told us he’d made the decision not to run for reelection,” the former White House press secretary writes about the moment. “The party had done so much damage to his campaign, there was no coming back from it. He would finish his term, exit the presidential race, and endorse Harris. A statement would be going out shortly, telling the world his decision.”

Jean-Pierre says she doesn’t remember the rest of the call and that she felt “numb.”

“On the call, Biden seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur. I was angry and sad,” she writes. “I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible.”

U.S. President Joe Biden, accompanied by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, jokes about taking so many questions during a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on October 04, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Jean-Pierre defended Biden’s fitness during his administration as concerns about his declining state grew. Just weeks before Biden dropped out of the race, she called videos of the 82-year-old president looking lost and wandering off as “cheap fakes,” claiming they were edited.

The former White House press secretary writes in the excerpt that seeing how Biden was treated by his own party during the presidential election cycle led her to leave the Democratic party. Biden White House officials unleashed on Jean-Pierre following the announcement, telling Politico that it is a “grift.”

“There’d been too much going on to really focus on my own analysis or takeaways of what happened. Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different,” Jean-Pierre writes. “How I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it.”

“‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore,’” she says she told a friend.